Friday, July 30, 2010

Some Random Tables for Swords & Wizardry

Since I started DMing Swords & Wizardry (with Majestic Wilderlands) I been collecting random tables like mad. To make them easier for me to use I been coding them up for NBOS's Inspiration Pro. While Tablesmith is the grand daddy of this type of program I find Inspiration Pro far more flexible to code for.

Among the tables I created I have two I can release now. The first allows you to pick a Dungeon Level and it will roll a random encounter. The second will roll up a random spell book. You can download them both from here. Just unzip and copy into the Generators folder of Inspiration Pro. I keep them in a sub folder called S&W.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.